: nunspotting :

They’re scarce as hen’s teeth, nuns are. You hardly ever see them out and about, not like you used to, anyway. Certainly not outside of their natural habitat — convents, almshouses, vespers, places like that. While they’re not extinct, they are endangered. But so’s the whooping crane.

That doesn’t stop birdwatchers from looking for them, though, does it? Heck, no. If and when they finally clap eyes on one, hot damn!, they get all atwitter. Well, spotting a nun affects me the same way — you could say they’re my whooping cranes. My shooting stars.

Seeing one is such a rare and momentous event in this day and age, it’s almost a portent. An omen of things to come; good things, amazing things. Go ahead, laugh, call me superstitious, but I’m telling you nunspotting has consequences. And I spotted a carload.

Can you imagine? A Camry-full of nuns stopped right before my eyes. At the corner of Monroe and Bryan, not twenty feet from where I was standing. I was dumbstruck, no, make that dumberstruck. All I could do was point and stare with my mouth hanging open. What else could I do? Curtsy? Cross myself? Genuflect? How? I couldn’t move.

Holy moly, I thought, lucky me. I ought to buy a lottery ticket. Or send the screenplay to Hollywood. Things are about to take a turn for the incredibly spectacular. Unless … Would ‘carload’ be stretching the truth if there was a grand total of two nuns in the car, a driver and a passenger?

What do you mean, yes? They were nuns, plural with an ‘s’, and they were in a car. On a public thoroughfare. It counts. I know it does. This wasn’t Elvis at an IHOP. These were real, living, breathing, honest-to-goodness nuns. In a Toyota, where two adults is full capacity. Ipso facto a carload.

Still not buying it? Great, instead of a lucky streak of mythic proportions, I’ll be smited for gilding the lily. What’s the retribution for an overstatement, do you think? Getting struck by lightni